Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

the sort of stuff we talk about at the church,” my mother told us.

I sensed my father’s interest, a lull in the anger he’d brought into the room. He sat, leaning forward to learn something about this mysticism business.

The host explained that to clean their intestines, yogis swallowed long strips of linen that they worked through their digestive tracts. The TV image switched to a small, mostly naked brown man who was feeding linen into his mouth, his Adam’s apple moving laboriously, as if he were trying to eat a very large spaghetti noodle. As the yogi rolled his belly with each gulp, the host said it took hours for the linen to reach the intestines. Then the yogi would draw the linen back through his body. The last shot was of him pulling it from his mouth. He smiled as he held it out, black from its journey into his bowels.

My father was motionless, his mouth open.

“That’s shit,” he finally said. “That guy’s pulling shit out of his mouth. That’s disgusting!”

He picked up the small book he kept his business numbers in and hurled it at the TV.

“Go to bed! All of you, go to bed!” he shouted. “That’s fucking disgusting!”

Lying beneath the covers, I wondered what about the yogi had made him so angry. The little man’s actions hadn’t seemed magical at all, but rather like a difficult and time-consuming form of flossing, which I despised.

✴

SUMMER CAME AND went, my mother and father rarely together, my brother and I reading and playing so much Dungeons & Dragons that we hardly noticed anything else. Then school started again, and we mourned the loss of our free time.

Now everything was definitely changing. My mother and I sat in Baskin-Robbins, and as I ate my ice cream, she explained that she wouldn’t be with my father much longer. She said that she loved me and never wanted to leave me.

“But how do I know what I should do?” I asked and licked a run of melting chocolate off the waffle cone.

She considered the question.

“The world is both physical and invisible,” she told me and described how thoughts and moods hung about us like clouds. We shared subtly in the lives of others by crossing paths with them, by breathing the same air. Truths could also come to us like this.

I licked my Rocky Road and gnawed on the cone. It seemed she was telling me that by taking a few deep breaths I’d know what was best.

“You just need to meditate on the right choice,” she said and smiled, as if, were I to do so, the white light of my soul might flare up like a neon sign in a bar window, spelling out not Budweiser or Molson but Go with Your Mom!

Her hair was graying quickly, and it reminded me of when she’d once picked me up from school after getting a perm. I’d neared our van, seeing the woman with the curly hair, and had turned away. She’d laughed and called to me, but I’d been afraid. If she left without me now and I didn’t see her for years, maybe the same thing would happen.

“But André and I are going to travel and go fishing,” I told her, suddenly upset, letting the chocolate drip over my fingers.

“What?” she asked, the gentleness emptying from her eyes.

“He’s going to get us a motor home, and we’re going to live in it.”

“That’s bullshit,” she told me. “He’s going bankrupt. He can’t even afford to make payments on his car. He’s lying to you. He lies to everyone.”

✴

DAY AFTER DAY, I tried to think of what else he might lie about. There had been the afternoon when the two men stopped us on the valley road and he lied about not being himself. The police hadn’t come again, so maybe he’d tricked them. I denied the bad things I did, so why wouldn’t he? And he misbehaved even more. The list was long.

He drove like a daredevil.

He’d been in lots of fights.

When we lived by the ferry, he’d knocked a man unconscious and broken a woman’s jaw.

When he was angry, he yelled at my mother.

She’d tried to run away, and he’d just followed her.

Often, he made cruel jokes.

If I did stay with him, I might starve, since he ate candy bars and Pepsi the way a gerbil lived off brown pellets and water. And yet he was wild and didn’t care what others thought. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. An exciting new disaster might happen at any moment.

And I loved the tricks he played. He called everything an old Indian trick, so that I pictured an old brown Native man telling him, “Don’t forget to blow on a fire to get it to start,” or “If you’re losing a fight, kick him in the balls and then in the face. Who gives a shit if he’s down. Kick his teeth out. It’s a fight.”

“This,” he said, “is my favorite old Indian trick.” He was storing the chain-link fencing he used each winter at his tree lots, and after he stood the rolls on end, he propped cinder blocks on top, just out of sight. If thieves tried to steal the fencing, the blocks would fall on their heads.

Once, on his big lot downtown, he discovered that someone was climbing the corner of the fence each night and stealing a tree.

“Here’s a good old Indian trick,” he said and emptied a bag of dog shit on the ground. He rolled a tree in it and then he propped it in the corner where the thief had been. The next morning, he took me outside the fence to where the tree lay near the road. We laughed long and hard about the thief who’d gotten smeared with shit.

But sometimes his antics didn’t make me feel that good, as when he caught a long-legged spider on his dashboard. We were waiting at a light. It was summer, the windows down,